


Painting Red Madonnas

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Buddy comedy, Canon - Book, Comedy, Drama, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Family Drama, Gaslighting, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Manipulation, One-Sided Attraction, Past Relationship(s), Stalking, Volturi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-14 09:47:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29665413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: A Bella who has never had a run in with vampires, misses registration while studying abroad and signs up for an art course in the nearby city of Volterra. Only, it's not an introductory course, she's somehow the only student, and she has zero talent. Aro's centuries old plan to get Marcus a hobby and a life finally comes to fruition in the strangest of ways.
Relationships: Aro/Carlisle Cullen, Carlisle Cullen/Esme Cullen, Didyme/Marcus (Twilight), Edward Cullen/Bella Swan, Marcus & Bella Swan
Comments: 64
Kudos: 220





	1. Chapter 1

Bella looked up at the wooden sign, squinting against the afternoon sunlight, trying to make out the faded and barely legible Italian. It could be wishful thinking, but she thought she could make out “ _Academia_ ” somewhere up there.

As it was, Bella wasn’t entirely sure she was on the right street, looking at the right building number, or even in the right city.

Bella, in other words, had messed up.

It wasn’t that complicated of a story.

Bella had been spending the past three months studying abroad in Italy.

Now, unlike many, Bella really didn’t have a legitimate excuse to be here. She wasn’t an art history major, not an art major either, not a history major, and definitely not an Italian major. It’d really been a tossup between England, an excellent choice given her love of Jane Austen as well as her English major, and Italy.

But England was cold, wet, and dark. After having resigned herself to living in Forks and then attending university in Seattle for the past five years, Bella was not about to send herself to Forks 2.0. Even if it was the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, and Austen. Mr. Darcy would forgive her, but Bella wanted a tan.

Italy had won out because sunshine, food, wine, hot European men, and the flimsy excuse of “connecting with her Italian roots.” (To Bella’s knowledge, no one in the family was remotely Italian. Charlie’s family came from England way back when and Renee’s was Polish. They just liked the name Isabella.)

And so far, it’d been working out for her.

Sure, her Italian medieval literature class might have been in actual Italian, reading Dante in his original actual Italian.

(Having to sit in the lecture that first day before she dropped the class, pretending she understood what the hell anyone was saying, might have been the most embarrassing moment of her life. Right up there with nearly getting hit by a van then asked to Tolo by the guy who almost crushed her. Then having that guy show up at her house to take her to Prom… Then going with him to Prom because she didn’t have a date.)

Sure, finding classes that were actually in English might have been a little… more difficult than Bella had anticipated. Hell, navigating the registration website alone had been an adventure and a half with her English-Italian dictionary. But it’d worked out, she was taking courses that vaguely related to her major or else counted for some general education requirement that she hadn’t gotten out of the way yet.

But then registration for her second semester had happened. Specifically, it had happened on the morning after Bella had decided to partake in just a little too much red wine and Bridge Jones’ Diary binging. Which meant that every single class Bella could reasonably take, i.e. not in Italian and nowhere near the science department, was filled. And after sobbing desperately for an hour, praying to the god she didn’t believe in to send her a miracle, she’d stumbled across the sad little lifeboat he sent her way.

Bella was only going to be taking one course her final semester in Italy. Which was fine, she was good on the credits, it was a little less than Bella would have liked but that was fine. In fact, this gave her plenty of time to sight see. Being in Florence, or Firenze as she later learned it was called by the locals after sounding like a dumbass for weeks, she’d only really had a chance to tour around Tuscany and taking just one course would give her a chance to get out of the region or even the country itself.

Even if that course was for some reason five days a week.

Bella could have her tourism, her sunshine, and her wine. So, the one course life wasn’t such a bad idea.

It was also an art course, which would be fun, and hopefully easy. Bella would draw a few faces, work really hard, and walk out with a decent grade. And she could finally get that art requirement out of the way. She’d been avoiding that one for a while now, as the last of Bella’s artistic adventures had been her successfully playing “hot cross buns” on the piano when she was eight.

It was… not in Florence though. Evidently, the reason this course hadn’t been filled to the brim, was because it wasn’t directly through the university. Instead, it was offered through some small art academy associated with the university, located in a small medieval town a relatively short bus ride away.

Which, sure, whatever, Bella could take a bus.

But when Bella had read “picturesque medieval town” she hadn’t realized that this meant there was no grid structure, no house numbers, no signs anywhere, and not even a sign telling you if you were in the right city.

(Bella frantically asking, “Volterra?!” and pantomiming her despair to the bus driver had undoubtedly been amusing for him but terrifying for her.

As it was, she still had no idea if this was Volterra.)

Still, Bella was willing to take that “ _Academia_ ” as a good sign. And if it wasn’t, well, then she’d just missed her first day of lecture.

With a deep sigh she pushed open the door.

It was an old building. The entire town was old, a place that had kept its medieval walls and cobblestone streets that long predated the renaissance. This place though, while renovations had obviously been done on the inside, had kept most of its structure intact.

The floors were black and white marble, scuffed and worn down by age and centuries of foot traffic. Artwork from several different periods lined the walls, each with some scribbled signature at the bottom.

It looked like it should be a museum.

Except, it was also a very strange building.

There was practically no natural light coming through on the inside. Maybe the windows had been redone, or something, but everything instead was lit by garish fluorescent lights. It could be to protect the paintings, that made sense, but it also felt a bit extreme.

There was also no one inside.

“Hello?” Bella called out, then, wincing, and corrected, “ _Bonjourno?_ ”

She probably should say good afternoon, given the time of day, but the exact words for that were slipping her mind. Which, really, was pretty pathetic given she’d been here for three months now but Bella was not a polyglot.

No answer.

There wasn’t a receptionist at any desk, no desk even, just the empty building with its empty hallways.

Frowning, Bella dug out the parchment she’d written her schedule information down on.

Right, Academia de Volterra, Room 104b, Monday-Friday 2-5 pm, lecture and studio. The sign had said Academia, Bella thought she was in Volterra…

Time to look for Room 104b.

Seeing nobody stopping her, Bella hesitantly made her way through the building, just waiting for someone to pop out and scream at her in Angry Italian for defiling this… whatever this place was.

A small amount of wandering later though, Bella arrived unmolested at Room 104b. Bella wasn’t sure if it was encouraging or not, but there was a sign taped to the door. In the most elegant handwriting Bella had ever seen it declared, “ _Anatomica Artistica_ ”.

Bella looked down at her schedule. Well, that matched the title of her class. Whatever the hell it even meant. When Bella had registered for it beyond the last minute, all she’d seen was the word “artistica” and figured that was good enough.

Which probably meant this was the right Room 104b, the right Academia, and the right Volterra.

Well done, Bella.

With a deep breath she opened the door and stepped inside only to stop immediately. Only shock and a feeling of growing dread kept Bella from slamming the door shut and screaming, “Sorry, wrong room!” in very loud English for the entire city to hear.

There were no other students. She had wondered about that on the bus. When she couldn’t spot any like aged peers, she figured either other students were leaving earlier or later than she was. When she’d seen nobody at the bus stop in Volterra she’d gotten a little nervous, but again, figured she’d wasted time getting lost and everyone else understood what they were doing. Plus, it was probably a small class anyway.

But there was no one else in here. There wasn’t even a sign of any other student in here. No backpacks, no purses, no jackets, no sign of any casual student life at all. Most damningly of all, only one canvas had been set up, a sad lonely easel dwarfed by the wide-open space.

There was, however, one other person in the room.

If you could, in fact, even call him a person.

The man she assumed must be her professor could have told her he was an alien, come down to Earth to spread pace, goodwill, and hotness to mankind.

And when Bella said ‘hotness’ she meant that she was staring at the most alienly beautiful person she’d ever seen in her life.

It was like… Until this moment, until Bella had looked at his face, she hadn’t understood what ‘beautiful’ was. Beautiful was the people you saw in the movies, it was covers on magazines touched up by photoshop. This man blew them all out of the water and Bella couldn’t even tell you why. It wasn’t any particular feature just… this was a face that God had made.

And the strange thing was that the longer she stared at him the more she didn’t think he should be this attractive.

First, there was no natural lighting in the room, all the windows had the blinds fully down and he was under harsh electric lights that did no one any favors. Somehow, it did nothing to detract from him.

Second, he was unnaturally pale. Bella had thought her milk-white, translucent, skin was bizarre. Even in Forks, she’d easily been the palest kid in school, and in Florence she was straight up Yikes. This guy was easily, somehow, paler than she was.

  
But he didn’t look sickly or like he’d just escaped an underground maze. His skin had this… glow to it. That wasn’t the right word, but it was the best thing she had. His skin was cool, clear, and almost seemed to refract the light coming down on him.

There were dark shadows beneath his eyes, easily noticeable against his pale skin, but in a way, they just helped to sharpen his features. They drew attention to his dark, ruddy, eyes and his dark, curly, hair.

Third, his face was… it was almost too perfect. It was symmetrical in a way that felt unreal, like you were staring at artwork meant to portray something masquerading as a human. He looked like a walking work of art, not someone who could actually open his mouth and talk.

She wanted to call him baby-faced, but that wasn’t the right word. There was no real softness in his face, but he looked young, like he was around her age if not younger. Except, given the oddly smooth texture of his skin, the stillness with which he held himself, and his worn suit that no one her age would be caught dead in, it seemed as if age wasn’t even a concept for him.

He stared across at her with absolutely no expression. There was no dubiousness, no suspicion, no mockery, no curiosity, nothing. He just stared, his head slightly tilted, dark eyes boring into hers with an intensity that wasn’t natural.

“Ghieagojsoegh,” was the unintelligible stream of babbling that exited Bella’s mouth.

She closed her mouth abruptly, eyes wide, face flushing.

He didn’t even blink, didn’t so much as twitch, and instead kept staring at her.

“Ah, is this—” Bella stopped, laughed awkwardly, and desperately tried to Italian her way through this, “I mean—that is— _Anatomica Artistica_? With Signor…”

Bella fished through for her schedule, glanced down at the name of the lecturer, “Marcus de Volterra?”

“ _Si_ ,” he said simply.

And nothing else.

Bella looked to the left, then to the right. No other students and no other “Marcus de Volterra” miraculously appeared. He was still staring.

“Um,” Bella said.

She could leave.

It’d be rude, but she could turn around, leave right now, and they could pretend this never happened. Renee would laugh at her, probably tell her she should have shut up and asked Hottie Mc Professor Hottie Pants on a date, but in a few days Bella would probably laugh too.

Except, she really had no other course she could sign up for.

And if she left now, with him just staring at her, she’d feel like she kicked someone’s puppy then threw it in front of a six-wheeler.

“I’m Bella Swan,” Bella said, trying and failing to smile, completely forsaking Italian for English, “Am I—on your roster? I mean am I—in the right place?”

Please, say no.

“Yes,” he said, without even a hint of an accent.

Oh god.

“Oh,” Bella said slowly.

They continued to stare at each other.

Was he going to invite her in? That easel was clearly for her right? Was he going to say anything? Any opening remarks? Make some joke about how unpopular his class was? Maybe introduce himself and whatever planet of pale beautiful people he came from? Ask her to introduce herself?

Anything?!  
  


Apparently, he wasn’t.

Well, Bella could leave now and cry, or she could get her credits and suffer through the next three months of class.

At least she’d be painting, painting should be fun. Bella had always wanted a chance to learn anyway.

Bella slowly made her way inside, ignoring his dark eyes trained on her, and sat in front of the easel. The man didn’t move, Bella didn’t dare turn to look at him, she just stared at her easel. She was sure his eyes were boring into the back of her head.

Three hours. It was only three hours of her life, five days a week. Bella was young and her whole life was ahead of her, she could do this.

A minute passed.

“Um,” Bella said slowly, not quite sure how to put it, “Is—uh—lecture starting soon?”

There was a flicker of—something—in his face.

Surprise, maybe. The guy, Professor de Volterra, was proving very difficult to read. He lingered for a moment longer, still staring at her with that indecipherable expression, and slowly made his way to the front of the room.

“Would you prefer lecture in English or _Italiano_?” he asked, not even sparing a glance for her as he wrote the course’s title on the black board. His handwriting matched the one that had been on the sign.

“English!” Bella said desperately, “Please, English, thank you.”

Oh, praise Jesus.

Bella had never been given a choice before. Either the course was in English or else it wasn’t. Even when it was in English, well, she usually managed to understand most of it but some of her professors (and especially her classmates) weren’t the best at English.

Certainly, better than her Italian, but it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park.

The way Professor de Volterra spoke, the crisp unaccented enunciation of each word, Bella was willing to bet he spoke perfect English.

He might just become her new favorite professor.

And just like that, he’d stopped writing, and started speaking, “In this class we will be primarily studying the anatomy of the human body. Translating our understanding into drawing and painting. Our studies will consist primarily of figure drawings, replications of famous pieces, and—”

Bella desperately opened her bag, drew out her notebook, and started taking furious notes.

There was something… really distracting about his voice. It… It didn’t sound like a normal voice. It was beautiful, but in a mesmerizing and ethereal way. The tenor of his voice almost sounded like one of those ringing wineglasses. If she didn’t focus on the words, on what he was saying, they became lost in just the tone of his voice.

“To start with today—”

Bella realized she’d missed whatever he said.

“Wait!” Bella said desperately, “Um, sorry, but can you—”

He blinked at her, as if he’d only just remembered she was there, that she was in fact the only other person in the classroom. On remembering her existence, he suddenly didn’t seem to know what to do anymore.

He stood listlessly at the front of the room, staring at her, as if waiting for her to take charge of the class.

“It was a little fast?” Bella said hesitantly, flushing furiously.

He just kept staring.

She shouldn’t have said anything.

There was another, subtle, flicker on his face. Once again, it was impossible to tell what it might be. It could be annoyance he was smothering, that seemed likely, or maybe surprise at her American gall.

Regardless, he didn’t comment on it, instead he said slowly, as if even he was uncertain of his words, “Perhaps a bit about yourself, Ms. Swan.”

  
Oh god.

She hated introducing herself in front of the class. She thought she left that behind her in Forks. She supposed this was more like introducing herself to a person except… well… This professor seemed insistent on pretending this was a normal lecture consisting of more than just one person.

Which meant Bella was introducing herself to an empty classroom.

“Right,” Bella said slowly, “My name is Bella, I’m American, from a town so small no one’s ever heard of it. I attend the University of Washington and am currently here abroad. I—uh—study literature and I guess I’m excited to try art for a bit?”

He kept staring. He didn’t even blink.

“I don’t exactly have much—any—art experience,” Bella confessed sheepishly, her face burning, “I sort of signed up for this class on—a whim I guess you’d call it. But I think it’ll be fun, and I’ll try really hard. So… yay art?”

After a very long pause he said, “Define art experience.”

“… I have never had an art class before.”

The last time Bella had done anything artistic was elementary school.

“You have never had any instruction,” the professor clarified, neither looking particularly dismayed nor pleased by this.

But she was starting to get the feeling that Marcus de Volterra had the world’s greatest poker face.

“No?” Bella asked. She saw “art” in the title and assumed that meant it was at least some level of introductory. To be honest, she’d been so desperate that she’d just signed up anyway.

He stared for a moment longer, and she had the feeling he was trying to decipher how serious she was about this. Which, unfortunately, was very serious.

Finally, he asked, “Are you familiar with the egg exercise?”

Bella was sure her face spoke her answer for her.

Without a word, the man walked out of the room, leaving Bella sitting at her easel. Was she—had she just been fired? Was that him telling her to get the hell out of his class? Couldn’t they negotiate?

She stood, made to take after him, only to end up tripping on her own feet.

Looking up she saw Professor Marcus back in the doorway, holding a carton of eggs.

“Why are you on the floor?” he asked as he stared down at her, his head cocked to the side like a bird’s, as if this were a perfectly legitimate question.

Bella giggled hysterically, “I’m fine, really, I just… Tripped, over my own feet… It happens.”

She picked herself up and sat back down. He hesitated in the doorway, staring for a moment longer, before making his way to a table in front of her. He set down the carton and drew out a single egg.

“I would like to gain an understanding of where we’re starting,” he said as he placed the egg in a wire stand, “Today, I would simply like you to draw this egg.”

“Just the egg?” Bella asked.

He nodded solemnly.

She stared at it, dubious. That… couldn’t be it. There had to be some trick, right? Or maybe he thought she really was that bad, had to see whether or not she was capable of drawing an egg or if they were starting with stick figures.

An egg, that was vaguely circley, Bella could do an egg.

She wasn’t sure why she needed three hours to draw one egg but—well, maybe this was just what they were doing first and they’d move on from here.

“Drawing the egg?” Bella asked, “Not painting?”

“We always draw first,” he explained, as if that explained anything at all. Bella just nodded as if she had some idea what he was talking about.

She picked up one of the many pencils that had been arranged for her. She looked at her canvas and then looked around to find a stack of thick paper. Right, that was probably for the drawing.

She glanced over at the egg, checked that it was still egg shaped, set her pencil to the paper and drew an egg.

She looked up at the professor, waiting for some sign that this really was it, she’d just passed the first step. He just kept staring, his dark eyebrows raised ever so slightly, and the oddest though still unreadable expression on his face.

Shit.

Bella looked back down at her egg.

It looked like an egg, but it clearly wasn’t drawn by a professional. It was the lines; they were probably a bit too wobbly.

Bella looked around for an eraser but couldn’t find any. Instead, she started on Egg 2.0, carefully and deliberately making her egg. This time, there were no wobbles, but it was a little—spherical to be an egg. This was a mutant egg you didn’t buy at the store.

Bella drew a scary face on it, a pair of fangs, and a speech bubble declaring, “I am a very scary egg. Take me to your leader, mortal fools!” Then, because she’d already come this far, she drew a chick in a wizard’s hat with a staff saying, “You shall not pass!”

Alright, Egg 3 then.

Egg 3 she felt was pretty damn good. It was egg shaped, the lines were smooth, and it was probably the best she was going to do. All in all, Egg 3 was a very solid egg.

She looked up at the professor only to find him missing.

She nearly fell out of her seat when she realized he was hovering over her shoulder, staring down at her paper with the world’s blankest expression on his face. God, how had he gotten there so fast? And how had she not seen him move?

“This is not good,” he finally said.

There was no menace in it, no criticism, but just the blunt way he said it felt so insulting.

  
“Sorry,” Bella blustered, blushing desperately, “I told you I’ve never had—”

He motioned towards the egg, “Look at the egg, Bella, what do you see?”

“… An egg?” Bella asked, not sure what she was supposed to answer, and certain that she was getting the answer somehow wrong.

He spared her a glance with those dark, unreadable, eyes, “Do you see any lines?”

“Yes?” Bella said.

“No,” he corrected, “What you see is an abrupt change of texture, of lighting. You see the shape of the egg through the shadows the light casts upon it. You do not see any lines. Draw what you see, Bella, not what your mind is convinced is there.”

… Bella just saw an egg.

She nodded as if she understood and moved her pencil back to the paper, preparing herself mentally to draw three hours’ worth of eggs.

“And not that pencil,” Marcus said as he stalked away from her again, “That pencil is too hard, use one of the softer ones.”

Right, Bella understood what that meant.

Bella made to draw the outline of the egg, only to pause. The professor wasn’t glaring at her, per se, but he was staring… intently. Clearly watching her every move from across the room. Right, no lines, just… shadow.

Bella squinted at the egg and could make out how it started brighter at the top then became darker at the bottom until it merged with its dark shadow.

Bella started drawing black squiggles, the shadow, and made them progressively lighter as she extended upwards in a vaguely oval direction. Frowning at it, she made the darker parts darker, trying to fill in all the little white gaps.

Eventually, she got a round thing that looked sort of like an egg without any eyes. It also looked kind of like a shadow monster.

It ended up being the best egg Bella made that night.

Later, standing out in the darkened street, she watched as the professor locked up the building behind him. He spared her the slightest, most hesitant, of nods as he began quickly walking down the street and towards the heart of the city. She just stared after him.

She felt curiously numb. Like, instead of class she’d just attended a very odd dream, and any second now she’d wake up back in the real world. She didn’t. Instead, she made her way to the bus stop, wondering if she’d get used to it if she showed back up at the same time tomorrow.


	2. Chapter 2

She was back the next afternoon.

No one had ever done that before.

Isabella Swan, Bella Swan as she had introduced herself, was sitting uncomfortably at the easel and small table that had been prepared for her. On one of the many sheets of paper he had provided, she had drawn not only another egg, but what looked like it might be a diseased cat battling a mutated toaster.

On sensing his entrance, she looked up at him and flushed furiously, her face changing from milk white to vermillion in only a second. Hers was the perfect expression of embarrassment, dismay, and shock.

“Ah, professor,” she said, stumbling to her feet and nearly falling over herself in coltish excitement, “Sorry, I was a little early, I thought I might have cut it a bit close with the bus last time and then the room was unlocked so—”

She cut herself off, giving him an expectant look, clearly waiting for him to say something.

But there was nothing to say.

Marcus couldn’t say he had expected anything from her one way or another. However, Marcus rarely expected anything. Marcus was firmly rooted in the present, lost in an ever-present haze that prevented him from looking too far back as well as looking too far forward. The world was what it was, in any given moment, at any given point of time.

Things simply happened, and that was all.

However, dimly, he recognized that for all he had been in this room many times, with many different humans, this had never occurred before.

When Aro had first built the academy, centuries ago now, Marcus had rarely if ever visited the place. Marcus tended not to go anywhere or do anything unless explicitly required of him, and back then Aro had been more enamored with wrestling artists from the Pope and Medici family. (Aro never did manage to commission Michelangelo or Raphael and to this day cursed the Vatican and city of Florence whenever anyone made the mistake of bringing up the subject.)

Then, for a while, it had been opera.

And then one day, centuries after the renaissance had ended and there were no more academies, masters, and apprentices, Aro told him that he thought, perhaps, what Marcus needed was a hobby.

Once, Marcus had been a great lover of the arts. Marcus could barely remember having felt enough to love or hate anything, so could hardly confirm or deny this. Aro felt that, perhaps what Marcus needed, was to be reminded of the joys of discovering art. Of how to see and preserve the world, to add some spark of sentient thought and emotion to it.

Marcus had learned over the years that it was simply easier to let Aro do what he wanted. Besides, Marcus couldn’t say he felt one way or another. As always, he was perfectly indifferent to the world that presented itself to him.

As it was, Aro’s dreams did not come to fruition.

First, the renaissance had ended, and the art world was no longer what it had once been. The artists had moved to Paris, the style and subjects had changed drastically. Instead of Madonnas and Emmanuels, it was a thousand hazy sunsets and lazy rivers, painted out of doors in a fraction of a second.

This was no longer a world of rich patrons and the works they commissioned.

As time passed, the artists returned to Italy, but not to the academies and not to Volterra.

Nevertheless, Aro persisted, and through a university in Florence that the Volturi were patrons of, set up courses for Marcus to teach. Sometimes, students would register and arrive for a first class, sometimes they even stayed for the full first lecture.

They never came back for the second.

It was in mankind’s nature to recognize and fear the vampire.

True, thanks in part to the Volturi’s two-thousand-year effort, mankind no longer believed in demons, but their hearts did. The instant they looked at his face, at his marble skin, they trembled. It did not matter whether his eyes were black, red, or some shade in between, their soul always knew him for what he was.

And so, Marcus had developed a routine. Every few months, whenever some mortal stumbled upon whatever course Aro had assigned for him to teach, Marcus would show up for the first lecture.

Often, the student took one look at him and immediately left. Sometimes, they made some paltry excuse, such as having forgotten their keys, their wallet, or in recent years their phone. Rarely, one would stick out the full lecture and quietly drop the course the next day.

The girl had been different.

She had been flustered, mortified, but there had been no fear in her. Not once had she looked at him with any of the terror that the others had. Instead, she had stayed, had spoken with him as if he were human.

Then she had performed the task he had provided for her so abysmally he had wondered if such a lack of talent was even possible.

It was enough, if only for a single afternoon, to make him wonder if he’d slipped out of reality when he wasn’t looking.

Seeing her here again, red-faced, awkwardly smiling, made him wonder again if he was now wandering through a dream. Perhaps Aro had founded yet another gifted vampire, an illusionist, and rather than set them upon Caius had thought to use Marcus as a guinea pig.

But then, it hardly mattered one way or another whether Marcus’ world was real or not.

The world simply was what it was.

And apparently, the world had seen fit to provide him Bella Swan.

“Sorry?” the girl said, though in a tone that indicated this was a question.

Ah, yes, she’d said something about arriving early.

“If the building is unlocked then you may enter,” Marcus responded, moving towards the front of the class.

“Oh, good,” Bella responded, clearly at a loss for something to say.

He stared blankly at the blackboard, wondering what, if anything, he should teach. She was here, she clearly expected instruction, and Aro’s manipulations or not Marcus did have a duty to provide what he’d promised.

However, this was an advanced course designed to study human anatomy, by those already more than familiar with the basics. From what he understood, from what he had seen, Isabella Swan’s experience had been limited to cartoons she drew in her notebooks.

“Um—” Bella said, interrupting his thoughts, “I know I probably should have said something yesterday but—uh—do you have a syllabus? And a grading rubric?”

He blinked at her, “You intend to finish the course?”

She looked at him as if he’d grown two heads, “Well, I mean, I do kind of need the credits and it’s—uh—a bit late to sign up for anything else.”

She then flushed, once again mortified, as if she had made some great faux pas, “Not that your class isn’t great! I learned a lot yesterday! Really, more than I ever have before and—I really have no idea why no one signs up for this, I think it’s because of the bus ride. Maybe try to teach in Florence next time?”

She paused, perhaps waiting for him to say something, and when he said nothing blurted, “You’re a great professor, sir!”

No one had ever said that before either.

“The syllabus?” Bella prompted desperately.

“There is none,” he said.

Given that he never had a second lecture, he had stopped bothering to make any.

“There’s… no syllabus?” Bella asked, her eyes growing impossibly wider, the first hint of horror beginning to grow on her features.

Not horror of him though, no, and not true horror. This was a petty dread, the kind reserved when the small things in your life went wrong. Such as when a professor failed to provide you a syllabus.

“Would you like a syllabus?” he asked, tilting his head, but this didn’t seem to make her any happier.

“Yes?” Bella asked, her voice squeaking ever so slightly.

Marcus considered her for a moment. Ordinarily, he did not spend much time making decisions. Usually, the path forward was obvious, or if not obvious then not worth his time to consider. He could not remember the last time he had needed to pause and reflect before.

Remembering Bella’s egg, he could tailor the course to her lack of previous experience, make it a truly introductory course. However, this was disingenuous, as she had signed up for something far more difficult.

More…

As much as Marcus wished or did not wish anything, he did not wish to teach only the basics. It was not a strong feeling, had someone insisted one way or another he would not have argued, but it was there none the less. The slightest, subtlest, preference.

He quickly wrote out a quick schedule, walked over to her, and handed it to her. She took it gratefully, nodding with a blank look on her face, making it perfectly clear that she had no familiarity with any of it.

Marcus found himself wondering why she signed up for the course.

Which, of course, was a very strange feeling, as Marcus rarely paused to wonder about anything.

“And, uh, the rubric?” Bella asked.

He considered her again. Just as he’d never gotten as far as having to make a schedule, he’d never had to grade a student’s work. He wasn’t quite sure how one judged art on a sliding scale like that.

He considered her, her awkward, desperate, smile, and decided, “You failed the egg exercise.”

Her jaw dropped, “What?!”

“You showed some improvement,” Marcus admitted, “But the quality of your work remained extraordinarily low.”

“Give me another chance!” Bella insisted, holding up her sheet of paper, “Look, I made another one!”

It was… better than her first attempts. She had learned not to draw lines. However, it was clear she did not quite understand how to shade properly.

Her shadows were far too dark, the graphite reflecting the electric lights it was so thick. Her shading, too, had been done in whatever direction suited her. What should have been the smooth surface of an egg was instead matted and crosshatched. Rather than smoothly changing from shadow to light, there were distinct and uneven jumps in lighting.

“If you successfully draw the human figure by the end of this course,” Marcus said instead, “Then I will give you a passing grade.”

“An A,” Bella corrected.

“A passing grade,” Marcus corrected in turn, “I will give you the highest grade if you impress me.”

By the look on her face, she felt this was very unlikely. As it stood, Marcus agreed.

Bella set aside her paper and held up her hands in defense, “So, let me get this straight. If I can draw a person, by the end of this course, you will give me a B.”

“A C,” Marcus corrected, “C is the average grade as I understand it.”

“Oh, no,” Bella corrected, now looking angry, a stubborn tilt to her chin, “Grade inflation, sir.”

Marcus didn’t understand.

“I don’t know where you’ve been, but a B is the new C. So, if I draw a person for you then I get at least a B by the end of the semester.”

Marcus… was not entirely sure what she meant. However, he was hardly one to pay attention to any trends, let alone trends in human society, so he nodded slowly. She kept staring at him, as if daring him to take back his words, but then seemed to consider the matter settled.

He was not sure what to think about that.

He decided it was best to turn to the lesson.

“Today, we will continue to focus on shading and introduce the study of geometry,” Marcus said, moving to the board to draw a quick sphere as well as a cube, “To fool the human eye into seeing three dimensions projected onto a two-dimensional surface, we must make use of our understanding of lighting, perspective, and shading.”

Bella started flailing, just as she had the day before, as she desperately drew out her notebook. She nearly dropped it onto the floor three times in the process. He had nearly finished speaking by the time she managed to open it and scribble notes.

She reminded him of something.

It was hard to focus, hard to remember, but there was something about her that reminded him distinctly of something…

It didn’t come to him.

He paused for a moment, waiting for her to catch up, then concluded, “When you have mastered this, we will begin to move onto concepts pertaining to human anatomy.”

“Define mastered,” Bella said slowly, he simply stared.

“If you cannot shade correctly you will never be able to convey the correct texture,” Marcus finally said.

“So—”

“Your shading should be done in the same direction when conveying a smooth surface,” he elaborated, “If it changes, then it should be done explicitly to convey a change in texture. Any change in lighting should be deliberate, with gradual chances being done gradually so that sharp edges stand out.”

Bella looked down at her egg, then back up at him, “You didn’t say any of this yesterday.”

“Yesterday, I was simply seeing where we started,” Marcus explained.

She looked as if she wanted to say something to that, even went so far as to open her mouth, but then closed it and shook her head.

She was, he decided, a very strange girl.

Marcus was not overly familiar with humans. There were the secretaries, he supposed, but while they knew him by name and always smiled when they greeted him, he rarely interacted with them. As it was, they seemed to disappear every time he blinked, replaced by a new human girl at the desk.

For a vampire, that was more interaction with humans than most had. The only vampire he’d say was truly ingrained in human society was Carlisle Cullen, that strange man who had once lived in Volterra so many years ago now.

Regardless, what Marcus meant was that while Marcus had once been human himself, well over three-thousand years ago, he would not fool himself into believing he remembered much about humanity.

They were distant cousins to him now.

He was sure though, that this girl was not your ordinary representative of mankind, and not simply because she was still sitting here.

She was a pale thing, almost pale enough to pass for one of his kind to a pair of human eyes. She was a young woman, clearly having exited adolescence, but something about her still seemed youthful. Her dark eyes were just a little too large for her face and her legs just a touch too thin. All of this gave her a delicate look about her which seemed juxtaposed by what he’d seen of her vivacious personality.

There was nothing delicate or fragile about the way she ground her pencil into the parchment, drawing three mutated cubes, until he demonstrated how to go about applying a lighter and more delicate touch.

This was not a face that fit its bearer.

She also had very few strong relationships.

Marcus himself had very few relationships in his life. There was Aro, his brother and all that remained of Didyme, then there was Caius. He was familiar with the guard, spoke to them on occasion, but even the oldest of them had only known him after…

There was a wall between him and the world.

Vampires, in general, were solitary creatures. More like tigers, Carlisle Cullen had once mused to Marcus, than men.

Bella Swan was much like him, far more than he expected any human to be.

She had one, solitary, strong relationship. It was solid, built up year by year and brick by brick, through hard work and perseverance, and felt distinctly paternal in nature. Her father or someone she considered to be a father.

The maternal strand was present but dimmed. It was a relationship Bella cherished, one she fed, but not one she relied upon. Bella did not consider her mother, or her maternal figure, to be someone she could trust.

Her other relationships were muted and dimmed. A friendship that had grown stale, broken and worn down by betrayal, time, and distance. A few, paltry, acquaintanceships that had never been more than friends of convenience.

And then nothing at all.

This was a girl who was an island unto herself.

He wondered why that was.

He was no judge of character, but she did not seem unpleasant, nor did she seem embittered over her lack of companionship. Were it not for his gift, he probably would not have noticed her isolation at all.

Simply watching as she worked, for a mere three hours at a time, yielded nothing to him.

By the end of the class, she presented him her paper, “Well, do I pass today?”

She had improved. Her shading was markedly better, helped by his critique throughout the studio time. It was still… it was not what he would have accepted from any other student. Her lines were still too harsh, the direction of her shading still not entirely even, and her cubes squashed and skewed in ways they should not be.

She was not an artist.

However, she had worked hard, noticeably harder than she had the day before, and she had improved.

So, looking her directly in the eye, he simply said, “You did not fail.”

She looked as if she were not quite sure whether to take that for a compliment or an insult.

In truth, it could be either, because Marcus had not intended it one way or the other. It was simply the truth as he saw it.

She still looked at him with anything but fear.

Later, as he locked up the building and headed back to the castle, he found himself wondering what she would bring tomorrow. Some part of him had accepted that, despite the odds, she truly would sit through every lecture of his course.

Bella Swan would be there tomorrow.

Strange, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought of the future.


	3. Chapter 3

“I don’t know, Mom,” Bella sighed, barely stopping herself from cursing as she smudged the nail polish she’d just applied to her toe, “I can’t really describe the guy.”

Hastily she wiped away the still wet liquid away and repainted.

Bella was in the middle of her weekly conversation with Renee.

Bella kept it to once a week because, unlike Charlie, Renee never really knew how to keep it short. Bella loved her dearly, but she just didn’t have an hour every night to spend on the phone with her mother. Especially with the godawful difference in time zones.

Plus, Bella could only really handle being told to “live a little” and “get out and make some friends” once a week. It wasn’t that Renee wasn’t supportive of Bella’s life choices, or hadn’t finally come to terms with the fact that Bella was an introvert, she just…

Well, Bella would never be the daughter Renee had probably pictured herself having.

No, that wasn’t right. She and Bella were just—such different people. She didn’t think Renee really understood her.

Charlie had always been better at that, but Bella was practically Charlie incarnate. Just, you know, in female millennial form.

It hadn’t sunk in for a while, months really, but eventually Bella realized that moving to Forks was kind of nice. Take out the rain, take out the stigma of being the police chief’s estranged daughter, and it had been comfortable living with Charlie. Enough so, that when Phil had wound up with a more permanent position and Renee asked Bella to come back, she’d said no.

  
Because Charlie just got it. There was no need to explain, no drawn-out conversations about anything, no nagging Bella about how she could be a little more social or maybe she should just put herself out there a little more. He just got it.

Renee would never understand why it was so hard for Bella to just ‘go out and make some friends’. Renee was so social, so likeable, that to her making a new friend was the easiest thing in the world. It was practically breathing for her, she just walked into a place and boom, new best friend.

Bella wasn’t like that.

She’d tried to be, for years, but it never worked out. Eventually, after Jake, Bella had realized that it was never going to work out. Bella didn’t know what it was, if it was something about her or just the way she tried and failed to interact with the world, but by her senior year of high school, she finally accepted that she would never make a friend.

Acquaintances, friendly enough classmates, sure.

Never a friend though.

Renee hadn’t clued in though.

So, every week, it was asking Bella if she’d seen that girl from her orientation group or if she’d talked to that cute boy from Spanish class again. And when the answer was inevitably ‘no’, it’d be well-intentioned lecturing and a pep-talk that Bella had to come out of her shell and show people how amazing she was.

And if Bella secretly had the personality of a crotchety old man, i.e. Charlie, well then Bella could get herself a hobby and become more vivacious.

Bella was almost grateful that, today at least, she had her unnaturally hot professor to distract Renee with.

Almost, because Bella was sort of regretting bringing him up.

“But he’s handsome,” Renee said, and Bella could almost see her delighted grin.

Whenever Bella told Renee she’d seen anyone ‘cute’ or ‘attractive’, Renee went mental. That Bella, at twenty-two, had never had a boyfriend was unthinkable to her mother. As a result, she was always trying to pair Bella up remotely with someone.

One time, she’d even asked point blank if Bella was a lesbian, followed by a half-hour long insistence and reassurance that Renee was always supportive of her beautiful daughter and that Bella’s first girlfriend would be treated like a member of the family.

Renee had almost been disappointed when Bella insisted she was not, in fact, gay, because it meant that Bella had neither a boyfriend nor a secret girlfriend.

Bella had hoped that Marcus de Volterra’s clear status as professor would spare him this treatment. Apparently not.

“It’s not like that,” Bella insisted, “He’s almost too handsome.”

That was one word for it.

Even after seeing him every day for a week now Bella—well, she no longer gawked quite as much, but the man did not look natural.

Frankly, the guy didn’t look human.

His skin always had that strange, pale, inner glow, no matter the lighting. His features always had the same, indescribable, cast of perfection to them.

If someone had asked her a few weeks ago, to describe the perfect human face, Bella would have laughed at them. The human race was so wonderfully diverse, had so many different means of beauty, how could Bella make just one face out of one set of features? Yet, sitting here in her flat, Bella could tell you that Marcus de Volterra possessed a perfect face.

Every day she left thinking she must have imagined all of it, given him these striking qualities he didn’t actually have, only to return the next afternoon and find that, no, Marcus de Volterra really did look like this.

And as the days passed, as she found herself staring at him with narrowed eyes, she started noticing more.

His skin wasn’t simply pale, but the texture of it was strange. It was at once too smooth and too hard looking. It didn’t look like human flesh, but instead like moving white marble.

Except, if you looked just right, you could see a strange flinty substance clinging to him. As if there was a layer of fine, translucent, powder over the top of his skin that never washed off.

Those dark, intense, eyes seemed to grow darker with every passing day. Except, there was always the barest, almost imperceptible, red sheen to them. As if, in the right lighting, his eyes might be the color of mahogany or even cinnamon.

There was also an almost imperceptible haze covering them, a milky white film that gave his eyes this opaque almost blind look. He never seemed to have any trouble seeing, though, seemed to have far better eyesight than Bella as he could critique her work from across the room.

After her second day in class, Bella had finally lost her mind, and google searched covers of Vogue magazine. Even the most touched up celebrities, defying the laws of reality through photoshop, looked nothing like him.

Eventually, she realized that they all looked far too human. Impossibly thin, skin impossibly perfect, but they still looked like people. They were made of flesh and blood.

Look at Marcus, and he was carved from stone. Beautiful, but something explicitly ‘other’, something she could easily believe came from another world.

But Renee didn’t know any of that.

“Bells, Honey, there is no such thing as a too handsome man,” Renee then paused and considered her words, “Unless he’s gay, the good-looking single ones are almost always gay.”

Bella cringed. God, sometimes, Renee was just so—

Bella rolled her eyes, “Well, I wouldn’t know about any of that.”

“Have you asked him?” Renee asked.

Because apparently, Renee would flat out ask her professor if he was “Gay or European”. The sad thing was, Bella knew she would, and she could almost picture it. She could even—no, actually, she couldn’t picture Marcus’ reaction if imaginary Renee were to ask him that.

Knowing him, at most, he’d blink and do that funny bird-like head tilt. More likely, he wouldn’t react at all beyond simply stating that he was not interested. God had made that man for poker games.

Jesus, Bella was already missing talking to Charlie.

“Mom,” Bella cried out in horrified indignation, “He’s my teacher. I can’t hit on him, even if I wanted to, and I don’t!”

“He won’t always be your professor,” Renee pointed out.

“Yeah, well, he is right now,” Bella scoffed.

“But he won’t always be,” Renee insisted, “And if you never ask him then you’ll never know if he’s interested.”

“He’s not,” Bella said.

“And you know this because?”

Because even if Marcus’ face hadn’t made it clear he was an alien then the guy phoning home every day in class filled in the rest of the gaps.

He was unnaturally still. He never twitched, never made any unnecessary motions, and when he did move it was with this eerie, unparalleled, grace that her eye could barely follow. In fact, sometimes, she swore the guy could teleport. He’d just appear over her shoulder, staring down at her work in judgement, as if he’d been standing there the whole time.

When they finally moved on from boxes and eggs to what Professor de Volterra deemed as ‘harder’, and Bella actually spent an hour trying to draw a goddamn nose, he would stop moving. He’d sit on a stool near the front of the room, a truly awkward distance away from her, and that would be it until she told him she was ready. He wouldn’t get up, he wouldn’t shift or tap his feet, he never looked around, or did anything. He’d just sit there, not blinking, sometimes not even breathing.

He rarely spoke. If he spoke at length, it was only during lecture, and said with as much passion as if he was reading aloud from the world’s dullest textbook. Otherwise, he wouldn’t even deign to give one-word answers, sometimes he wouldn’t bother to say anything at all.

And he never had any expression on his face. He never laughed, never smiled, never frowned, nothing.

Bella was only half joking when she thought that Marcus would only be interested in dating her if the home planet that sent him here to study the human race also wanted him to study how they reproduced.

To Renee, Bella just said, “Trust me, I know.”

“Bella, he would be a fool not to like you,” Renee said.

Oh god, here came the pep-talk.

“You are a beautiful, intelligent, kind, and wonderful young woman. Anyone who doesn’t want you needs to get their eyes checked, this Professor de Volterra included.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll be sure to tell him that,” Bella said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Bella,” Renee said, oddly harsh, “You have got to stop looking down on yourself! I didn’t raise you like this. You are a strong, fiery, young woman and it’s time you stop thinking of yourself like this.”

“I know,” Bella said hastily, “I don’t, Mom—look, he’s my professor, it would never work out in any universe even if I wanted it to, and I don’t. The guy’s weird, Mom. Brilliant and hot, but weird.”

Renee huffed, all fondness once again, “Well, you could have started with that.”

“Yeah, well, we got a little distracted by the ‘hot’ part,” Bella explained.

“Well, when he confesses to you just like all those boys in high school—”

“Mom, no, this is not prom—”

“Then I will just say I told you so,” Renee finished smugly, undoubtedly preparing herself for the day when Marcus invited her to romantic dinner after class.

There was a pause, Renee probably waiting for Bella to say yet again it wasn’t like that, and Bella waiting to see if Renee was done yet.

Apparently, she was, but the topic she moved onto wasn’t much better, “Whatever happened to that boy you liked in high school? The one you were so close with, Jacob Black.”

“Jake and I were just friends,” Bella said, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice, “And it didn’t work out.”

“Did you ever—”

“It didn’t work out,” Bella insisted, “It’s fine, I’m over it.”

She wasn’t, Bella wasn’t sure she’d ever really be over it, but admitting as much would just be giving Renee unlimited ammunition.

That, Bella was sure she didn’t need.

As it was, Renee bringing it up like it was Bella’s fault or that Bella could have tried a little harder to pick up the pieces…

That was the thing.

Bella had done everything she could think of and more.

Bella had called. Bella had filled his voicemail at least five times. Bella had sent a dozen emails.

When he never answered, when he never called her back, Bella had driven to the reservation, to his goddamn house, and practically broken down his door. Billy had lied to her face and told her that Jake was too sick to see her.

When she spotted Jake in the backyard, hanging around with all his new friends that he’d loathed only a few weeks before, he’d told her to get lost. And then, the icing on the goddamn cake, he’d even dropped ‘it’s not you, it’s me’. 

Eventually, she’d come to terms with it.

Jake, out of nowhere, had dumped her for Sam Uley’s weird gang. The gang that, even a few days before he’d gotten mono, Jake had been terrified of. He had called it a cult and then, just like that, he’d sawed off all his hair and joined it.

He never called her again, she never visited the res again, and when Billy came to her house, she always made a point of vacating the room.

Jake had come to her graduation, uninvited, and hesitantly told her that he was sorry, that he had his reasons, and he wished her well. She’d swallowed down everything and wished him the same. She knew in that moment that she would never see Jake Black again.

And she never had.

“I don’t want to talk about Jake,” Bella said to Renee, and to forcibly change the subject she asked, “How about you and Phil? How are things going for you guys?”

Renee hesitated, but she was always eager to talk about herself, and quickly immersed Bella in the daily gossip of her life and tales of the sunshine state. Bella eagerly listened in, as she always had, and let her own problems of strange professors and broken friendships fade from her mind.

However, Renee had unintentionally stirred up old feelings, and by the time Bella arrived in Volterra for class the next day her mind was stuck in the mire that was Jake.

She was over this.

She should be over this; it’d been years now.

Sure, he was the closest friend Bella had ever had in her life. Yes, for the few short months they’d been friends, Bella had understood what having a best friend was even like. But so what?

Bella wasn’t made for friendship, Jake had shown her that much, and it was time to accept it and move on already.

So, why wasn’t she moving on?

“Your hands look like squids.”

Bella jolted out of her thoughts, “What?”

Marcus was standing over her shoulder again, out of nowhere, again, and staring down with those inscrutable dark eyes at her drawings.

“Your hands,” Marcus repeated, tilting his head towards her paper, “They resemble squids, not human hands.”

Bella shook herself, looked down at the paper, then back up at the chalk board where Marcus had drawn a dozen example hands in a dozen different positions, each one hauntingly realistic and drawn in less than ten seconds.

Bella’s hands, by comparison, could generously be called squids.

“Oh,” Bella said dully.

Marcus turned from the paper to look at her, he surveyed her for a second, eyes boring into hers, before he declared, “You are not concentrating.”

“Sorry,” Bella said, “I—I had a rough day yesterday.”

God, if she was in a normal lecture, if she wasn’t the only person in this class, then this wouldn’t be happening. She could have her shitty day and no one would even notice.

Or she could just not show up, take a sick day, and not even have to say anything.

She could feel her cheeks burning with humiliation and shame.

“I’ll try again,” Bella promised, putting her pencil down to the paper, taking another closer look at the hands, trying to remember what the professor had lectured about. Something about joints, tendons, bones, and the basic shape of hands—

“You are still distracted,” he commented neutrally, still hovering over her shoulder.

“Yes,” Bella snapped. Then, forcing her anger out, she set down her pencil and dragged a hand through her hair, “I’m just having a really—not a great day.”

Marcus considered her, “Would you like to leave?”

“No—” Bella said, before she rethought the statement, “Maybe.”

She didn’t think she was going to get any works of art out of today, but then, Marcus de Volterra seemed unimpressed by her work no matter what she did.

Oh, he wasn’t mean about it, or anything. No, if anything, Bella felt like she was far meaner to him than he was to her. He was never sarcastic, never malicious, and whenever he did say anything too blunt it never felt like it was supposed to be insulting. He just said what he meant and sometimes he meant that her hands looked like squids.

The trouble was that he was—oh, Bella didn’t know—a perfectionist.

Or maybe not a perfectionist, but he was certainly something. He always expected one hundred percent, one hundred percent of the time, and even that only ever seemed to be ‘good enough’ or on the road to ‘good enough’.

Bella’s lack of experience, which she’d readily confessed to, seemed to mean nothing to him.

Bella had never drawn hands before? Never hands that weren’t circular blobs with seven and a half fingers? Well, too bad, Bella, because we’re steam rolling right ahead.

Marcus seemed to be waiting for her to make a decision one way or another though. Maybe, apparently, wasn’t good enough for him.

And if she wasn’t his only student, if he hadn’t come to this little room in this half-forgotten academy just for her, then she would have. She could be taking the bus back home and curling up in her apartment.

But what kind of a loser would she be if she’d made him come all the way out here only to leave halfway through his class? Just because she was upset that Renee happened to bring up a subject that had happened years ago.

“No,” Bella said, “No, I’m not leaving.”

She stared glumly at the board, willing herself to find the motivation to do this. However, all her energy seemed to have evaporated into thin air. God, she still had two hours to go, this was going to be a very long class.

At her response, at Bella’s confirmation that class wasn’t over yet, Professor de Volterra had returned to his natural state of being an alien.

Instead of staring at her, he was now staring dead-eyed at the wall over her head, without blinking. She was sure if she left him to it, he’d be standing there staring at that wall for the next hour and a half.

But—

Bella wasn’t good with people.

In Phoenix, she’d been this awkward, shy, pale, wallflower that no one talked to. She’d literally eaten lunch by herself since grade school. In Forks, thanks in part to Renee’s notoriety and the small-town atmosphere, Bella had been very popular for about a year and a half. That first half year Bella had been there, she’d been asked to the same dance three different times and had had to flee to Seattle. Then she’d gone back to being a wallflower.

There was Jake—

Other than him, it was pretty much Renee and Charlie, and if she was being really honest then when it came to talking about the hard things in life then it was pretty much Charlie.

But Charlie had nearly put a bullet through Jake’s head once when he’d dumped her out of nowhere. Since then, Jake had kind of been a taboo topic. If Bella brought up Jake out of nowhere, called Charlie up and said, “Hey, remember when Jake cut off all contact with me and I realized that I had social leprosy and gave up completely on the concept of friendship? Well, I’m starting to realize I might still be upset about that and I might need to talk to someone. You game?” then he would probably break down Billy’s door to throttle Jake.

That, and Charlie was generally allergic to conversations about feelings and boys and would probably take it the wrong way.

But, given today, given yesterday, Bella realized that maybe she did need someone to talk to. Not about making friends, or anything, Bella was over that. But—clearly, she was hung up on something.

And she had no one to talk to.

Because the one person she would have talked to, Jake, no longer took her phone calls.

Except, now she found herself staring at Professor de Volterra, who was blindly staring at a wall.

Bella didn’t think she needed advice; she didn’t want advice. She didn’t want to patch things up with Jake, if that was even a possibility at this point. She didn’t want to go out and try and fail to make new friends, she’d played that game and lost more times than she’d lost little league softball.

But maybe she needed to talk to somebody.

Marcus de Volterra had the social intelligence, general awareness of normal human behavior, of a jellyfish. He never commented on anything Bella said or did, whether it was being his only student or falling flat on her face five times in one lecture. He just had this air about him like he could take anything the world threw at him without batting an eyelash.

If there was anyone in the world who couldn’t judge her, who would never judge her, then it had to be this guy.

More, once class was over, she would never see and never contact him again. He didn’t know anyone she knew, would never talk to anyone about this and…

Except, Bella would be spilling her heart out to her art professor who had only a week ago told her that he might give her a C if she produced a miracle.

Flushing brilliantly, Bella forced herself to say it, “So, since I—uh—don’t think I’m going to be productive today, do you—mind if we talk a bit?”

He looked at her like she was the alien and had announced that she’d just laid eggs in his stomach.

Well, that was a lie, his face was expressionless as always, but Bella imagined that beneath his poker face this was the face he was really wearing.

Bella tried not to look directly at him, “I—I think I might need to talk about something, and, for a couple of reasons, I literally have no one else I can talk to.”

“You wish to speak to me?” he asked. Again, this was said without any inflection, any hint of emotion, but Bella could imagine the thick dubiousness to the tone.

“I know, I know,” Bella assured him, “I know it’s not in your job description, I just—I really don’t think I’m going to get anything done today and it’s—It’s time I got this out of my system.”

He kept staring. After a few seconds of weighted silence, Bella took that as her cue to continue.

She let out a long sigh, “So, I—have no friends.”

Marcus did not seem particularly surprised or impressed by this admission.

She felt like she should feel very worried about that.

Maybe, to someone else, it was obvious what was wrong with her. Funny, it’d never been obvious to her, she’d just known she wasn’t her mother.

“I’ve never had friends,” Bella continued, “I tried, but the best I can do is just make friendly acquaintances, I can’t—I just can’t get any closer than that.”

She sighed, “Once though, there was this guy. He was the son of my dad’s best friend. I didn’t live with Char—my dad, for a long time. I visited every summer for a while, until I refused to go anymore. I knew Jake from there, but he was younger than me, so I mostly hung around his sisters. Later though, I moved back in and he was—friendly.”

She tried to smile, “Too friendly, flirting really, but I never thought of him that way. I didn’t mind though, we just—we really clicked. We hung out every day for months, I got him to teach me how to ride a motorcycle, and I helped him out with his homework.”

He’d promised to do more than that. When the weather cleared up, he was going to take her cliff diving or hiking, no matter Bella’s debilitating clumsiness. They never got that far, but for those first few months, it’d been fun.

“Then, one day, we went to this stupid action movie, and he got really sick. I call the next day, his dad says he has mono, and he can’t talk to me. Except, that mono, it’s so bad that Jake can’t talk for weeks. He can’t even text.”

Here Bella did smile because it’d been such a joke. She’d been worried for the first week, panicked the second, and the whole time he just hadn’t wanted to talk to her.

“Eventually, I just drive to his house, demand to see him. Well, turns out he wasn’t in his room, wasn’t sick at all. He was—running around shirtless with new friends that a few weeks before he’d thought were creepy losers. He told me he didn’t want to be friends anymore, that it was his problem and not mine, and then we never talked again.”

Bella looked at Marcus, perhaps to get a sense of what he thought so far, but there wasn’t any hint on his face.

“I never figured out what it was,” Bella said, “I figured it must be something about me, given my track record, and I never really got a chance to talk to anyone about it. I just—maybe that’s what it was, I just want to know why.”

If she knew why, if she had closure, maybe she could let it go.

For a long moment, Marcus just looked at her, and then said, “I will not pretend to understand the human mind.”

Was that it?

Why was she surprised? She should have expected that answer, “Yeah, I got that.”

“However,” Marcus said, now looking past her towards the covered windows, “Know that what you once had with this Jake was real.”

“How would you know—”

“I know,” Marcus said with unshakable confidence.

And Bella believed him.

Looking at him now, for all her jokes, she was suddenly certain he wasn’t human.

It was like something clicked in her brain and she just knew. He might look human, might wear a very convincing human shell, but this man was anything but human.

Suddenly, Jake was a million miles away from her thoughts.

“Your bond with him is broken,” Marcus insisted, as if he was still an ordinary man in an ordinary world and they were having an ordinary conversation, “Withered away to the point where it will never recover. However, it was real.”

Bella opened her mouth, then closed it.

Her heart was racing, her face growing cold, and she found she couldn’t hold a thought in her head.

All she could do was stare and think that her professor wasn’t human.

How he’d gotten here, why he had this human charade, how she’d wound up in this class with him was incomprehensible to her.

She just knew that everything and nothing had changed.

And yet she was still sitting in this art class from a man who made it seem like the world’s greatest task to bestow upon her a measly B.

Distantly, she heard herself saying, “Thanks for the advice.”


	4. Chapter 4

It occurred to him, very distantly, that Marcus had a problem.

Aro, as he was wont to do, had reminded Marcus that Heidi was scheduled to bring humans to the castle this morning, as she did every fortnight or so. Aro had taken to reminding Marcus as, centuries ago now, Marcus had missed dinner three months in a row due to losing track of time.

Every day seemed much the same to Marcus, and so it was easy for these things to slip his mind.

Normally, this made little impact on Marcus. Oh, it meant he had to be in a certain place and a certain time, but Aro was always in charge of Marcus’ schedule. Aro liked the idea of Marcus participating in trials, in evaluations of the guard, in any major decision even when Marcus hadn’t contributed anything worthwhile in a thousand years.

On his own time, Marcus found himself in the library staring at nothing or else in the gardens staring at nothing.

Except, of course, for the past week where, every weekday afternoon, he made his way to the academy to teach Miss Bella Swan.

No, that was a lie, he’d shown up on the weekend as well. He’d sat there for well over two hours before he’d remembered the concept of a weekend, and that Bella Swan did not have classes scheduled on Saturday and Sunday. Which of course meant he now had to keep track of which days were Saturday and Sunday.

Thankfully, Aro always gave him one of those little paper desk calendars, the current year’s featuring cartoons of a fat American cat in love with lasagna and sleeping. It seemed he would finally be making use of it.

Yesterday, the cat had pronounced his hatred of Mondays. This morning, it had eaten its owner’s dinner. The owner somehow didn’t notice.

Regardless, the weekend had come and gone, and with Monday their lessons had resumed. Bella Swan had appeared, had made… minimal effort and instead spent half the lecture gossiping and sighing over her adolescent love life. They were scheduled to see each other for the next…

He believed it was four days. He wasn’t sure, he’d have to check.

However, this was the crux of Marcus’ problem.

Ordinarily, his human students had long since vanished by this point. By now, Marcus would have resumed his usual habits of haunting the castle and trying not to think too deeply on anything.

Bella Swan didn’t seem to be going anywhere, he was scheduled to teach her every weekday afternoon, and in a few hours, he would be eating. He shouldn’t be late to class, dinner never took that long, and “cleanup” was always left to the guard, but nevertheless...

It was about six in the morning when Marcus realized that, were he to eat this morning, then there were certain things that Bella Swan was bound to notice.

At about six thirty in the morning, Marcus realized this was a true dilemma.

He could, in theory, simply take sick days until his eyes returned to a passable human color. However, the degradation of eye color was slow, it would take well over a week until his eyes were a proper shade again. If he did this every few weeks, then he might as well just cancel class.

He could cancel the class but—

He wouldn’t say he was attached to the class. It felt no different than anything else passing through his life. Had Aro told Marcus that Marcus no longer had time for it, that there was work to be done, then Marcus would acquiesce without hesitation.

However, he felt—responsibility. Yes, a distant sense of duty was ringing through his soul. Marcus, in offering his course, had made a promise to the girl, a contract of sorts. She could drop his course, but he could not abruptly pull out the offering and tell her to seek her credits elsewhere.

Similarly, he could not simply disappear for weeks at a time and tell her to make do.

It dawned on him, slowly, that this human girl needed him. Not in any real sense, but nevertheless, in the barest capacity that any human being needs another she needed him. Which meant that he could not disappear abruptly from her life.

Which meant that he needed to show up to lecture, today, without Bella Swan noticing anything amiss.

Marcus felt he had not been confronted by a problem of this magnitude since—He couldn’t remember. Mostly, whenever a pickle came his way, the answer seemed obvious or the problem hardly worth the effort to confront.

“Marcus, you do remember what day it is, don’t you?”

Think of the devil and he appears.

Aro entered into the gardens, grinning like an idiot as usual, and looking painfully like Didyme as usual. Marcus, once, had thought the instinctive pain at looking at his brother-in-law would fade, it never did.

In time, he simply became used to it.

Aro’s eyebrows were raised, clearly waiting for a response, this undoubtedly being one of those questions that required one.

Aro was very fond of asking questions where he required Marcus to provide an answer.

Ordinarily, Marcus just shoved his hand at Aro to be done with it, but that would mean Aro seeing his problem and—Well, surely nothing good would come of that, would it? Aro would then have suggestions, and nagging, and gods only knew what else.

“Tuesday,” Marcus said with all the enthusiasm that Tuesday deserved.

Aro blinked, once, then twice. The smile disappeared and he looked as if he’d been hit over the head with an anvil.

“Pardon?” Aro finally asked.

“Today is Tuesday,” Marcus repeated.

Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps his calendar had lied to him. However, Marcus vaguely recalled that (per the current human calendar), Tuesday tended to follow directly after Monday. Unless the calendar had changed again when he wasn’t looking. Maybe they’d finally gotten themselves a new divine carpenter and mucked with all the dates again.

“You—” Aro stopped, held up his hands as if to stop Marcus from interrupting, and then asked in an increasingly incredulous tone, “You actually remember what day it is? And you—you said it aloud?”

So, it was Tuesday. Good.

Aro took a seat on the bench next to Marcus, staring at him in wonder, “Are you feeling quite alright? Has anything happened?”

Aro then reached out his hand towards Marcus’, only to stop, and hesitate. A conflicted look appeared on his face, as if he both wanted to know and didn’t, as if whatever he found in Marcus’ mind might not be what he was looking for.

Was Marcus feeling alright?

He felt much the way he always did which was—very little, if he was being honest.

As for if anything had happened, well, that was it, wasn’t it? Something was always happening, it was just that nothing that happened ever truly mattered.

That hadn’t changed.

“No,” Marcus said simply, “Nothing has happened.”  
  


“And yet you are so verbose,” Aro exclaimed, “Why, I don’t think we’ve had a conversation this long since Dear Carlisle was here.”

Oh, Carlisle Cullen, Marcus dimly realized that this was not a good sign. Whenever Carlisle Cullen inevitably made an appearance in a conversation with Aro, the conversation completely derailed into Aro’s lovesick babbling.

Caius usually left the room whenever it happened. Marcus, unfortunately, always faced the dilemma of whether it was more effort to listen or more effort to escape.

Staying and attempting to tune Aro out had always won out before. Walking simply took too much energy. Not to mention Aro would inevitably end up babbling this same nonsense later.

However, today, miraculously, he managed to find the will to leave. He stood from the bench in the middle of Aro’s sentence, Aro once again musing about Carlisle’s mysterious wife Esme, and started to make his way back into the castle.

Unfortunately, Aro stood right after him, mouth hanging open wide enough to catch flies.

“Are you leaving?!” Aro asked, sounding torn between indignation and delight.

“Yes,” Marcus supplied.

Aro hurried after him with the world’s largest grin on his face, “Marcus, surely, something extraordinary has happened!”

No, he simply had no wish to listen to Aro’s drivel over Carlisle Cullen.

“You must tell me what it is,” Aro insisted, “Or, perhaps, you can simply show me—”

Marcus wracked his mind, trying to think of where he could possibly escape to.

Aro seemed in quite the mood and would likely follow wherever Marcus went.

Ordinarily, when times were desperate, making a visit to the wives was a sure-fire way to get Aro to disappear for a few hours. However, that meant visiting Sulpicia and Athenadora, which would be equally unpleasant in its own way.

If he went to the academy early, he would be skipping his meal, and Aro would either follow him into town or would wait for him eagerly to return.

“Marcus,” Aro repeated, his smile now a touch mischievous, “If you simply show me there would be no need to run away. I promise, whatever it is will not upset me.”

Marcus, having walked accidentally into a dead end in his distraction, gave up hope.

He reached for Aro’s hand and placed it in his own. There were few memories of interest for Aro to peruse, having seen most already, so catching up on the past few weeks took only the blink of an eye.

“You have a human student,” Aro breathed with fascinated delight, “Oh, and such a strange girl too, with no talent whatsoever. You do have your work cut out for you, don’t you?”

Marcus said nothing, his dull agreement would be radiating through their touching hands.

“I think I like her,” Aro said to himself, musing over Marcus’ memories of the girl and their lessons thus far, “Yes, I like Miss Bella Swan quite a bit, she has fire, doesn’t she? And is utterly fearless too, almost to the point of obliviousness… Which I must say is a tad concerning, but ah well, it brought her to you, did it not?”

“And of course, you cannot quit,” Aro insisted, putting his arm around Marcus’ shoulder and guiding them back towards the throne room, “You made a promise to Dear Bella. You can’t abandon her now, Marcus. Why, without you, she would be trapped doodling malformed eggs for the rest of her mortal life, and we can’t have that.”

Given what Marcus knew of Bella, which granted was very little, he thought she would be perfectly content drawing malformed eggs for the rest of her mortal life.

However, Aro had no time for that, “No, no, we will come up with a solution for you, brother. You may continue to teach your lessons and the girl will be none the wiser regarding your true nature.”

That was all well and good, but the problem had not disappeared.

“Here, I have something that may be of some use,” Aro dug around in his pockets and fished out a pair of extraordinarily dark aviators, “Use these when you go to her until your eyes are dark again.”

He regarded them dully, staring at his reflection in their surface.

He had not thought of that. He supposed this would do.

“See,” Aro said, squeezing Marcus’ shoulder tightly, “This was not so challenging, was it? No need to give up so soon. Remember, Marcus, that I am always here to help. Next time, we shall solve the crisis together, shan’t we?”

And so, only a few hours later, Marcus found himself in the academy’s classroom at the expected time, facing Bella Swan in a pair of aviators.

Bella stared at him for several seconds. Her brow furrowed as if confronted with a very perplexing puzzle. Finally, after a long silence, she asked, “Are you wearing sunglasses indoors?”

“Yes,” he answered simply.

She said nothing for several more moments, that puzzled, almost concerned, look never leaving her face.

Finally, she said, “Alright then.”

He turned to face the board. Per his syllabus, they would be starting to do real work today. Today would begin Bella’s first attempt at drawing a live model. Bella was far from ready for this, however, slowing down meant deviating from the syllabus he had given her.

More, as she’d offered no complaints of the pacing of the course or its contents, it seemed she wished to move ahead. Even if, at this point, she was doomed to receive a failing grade.

“Um, quick question—” Bella asked as his hand moved to the board.

He stopped and turned to look at her, she flushed violently red, as she did at least once per lecture, “Your last name, is it actually ‘of Volterra’?”

“Yes,” he said simply.

In truth, he had no surname in the modern sense of the word.

When he was human, men addressed themselves as sons of their fathers. When he was turned, there were so few of them that a surname was never needed. Then, later, the coven had become infamous enough that, when in Italy, there was only one Marcus.

The irony, of course, being that the name Marcus did not initially belong to him either.

Despite how ancient and immortal the Volturi coven seemed to the outside world, in truth it had not been formed for many centuries. Aro and his sister, Marcus, and Caius had been born within the same age, within a few centuries of one another, but it wasn’t until long after Alexander had come and gone, when Rome began emerging as the true power within the human world, that they came across one another and established their foothold in Volterra.

Rome was the power of the world then, not Athens, nor any Hellenistic state.

The Volturi required leaders with names that could be remembered, could be pronounced, by anyone across the empire. As Rome spread, Aro had envisioned, they too would spread with it.

So, Aro had shortened his name significantly, and Caius and Marcus had abandoned their names altogether. Only Didyme and Athenadora’s had stubbornly remained unchanged.

Of course, he had now been Marcus far longer than he had been anything else.

“Your last name is seriously just ‘of Volterra’, as in, this exact city we happen to be in,” Bella continued, evidently unsatisfied by his answer.

“Yes,” he responded, but she was looking at him as if he was missing something glaringly obvious.

She did not deign to point out what it was he was missing.

He turned back to the board.

“How old are you?” Bella asked just as he began writing.

How old was he? Or, rather, how old was he pretending to be?

He couldn’t remember. Aro had told him at some point, he was sure, but whatever number he was supposed to give was slipping his mind.

“Nineteen,” Marcus supplied, the age he had transitioned from humanity.

Evidently, this was the wrong answer.

“You’re a professor at nineteen?” Bella asked, eyebrows practically at her hairline.

“Yes,” Marcus said.

“I’m twenty-two,” Bella said slowly, motioning to herself, again as if there was something Marcus clearly wasn’t grasping here.

Once again, she failed to tell him what exactly this was. So, he turned back to the board.

“Sorry, one last question,” Bella interrupted quickly, before Marcus had a chance to finish writing even the first letter, “How did—why did you decide to become an art professor?”  
  


“My brother-in-law felt I needed a hobby.”

He waited for her to ask yet another question. She seemed tempted, biting her lower lip, eyes wide and large and practically screaming at him. However, she also looked as if his last answer had thrown her for such a loop that no questions remained.

Evidently, whatever she was going to ask was simply no longer applicable.

Good, answering questions was exhausting.

He returned to the board, “Today, we will begin our first session drawing a live model, something that will preoccupy us for most of the semester.”

He was about to say more when he stopped.

Marcus abruptly realized he had yet another problem.

Ordinarily, students never made it this far, and thus Marcus didn’t have to plan accordingly. For their lessons thus far, recapping the basics, very little planning had actually been required beyond providing Bella Swan the supplies.

Figure drawing, however, required live models.

He was a vampire. Even had he remembered to hire a live model, they would quake in terror at the sight of him, vomit on their feet, and likely leave before the studio time was even finished. Bella was far from the stage where she could draw without a live reference.

Fortunately for Marcus, it appeared the solution to this problem was more obvious than the problem he had this morning.

“I will be our model for all sessions,” Marcus said, “We will take half hour breaks where I will observe and critique your work.”

He’d prefer to do it without the sunglasses but he supposed it could not be helped.

He paused, to see if Bella had any questions, but it appeared she had none. So, without further ado, he began to remove his clothes.

Bella let out a shriek, fell out of her seat onto the floor, and turned scarlet as she began blubbering. It took her five seconds before intelligent sounds started pouring out of her mouth, “Whoa! What are you doing?!”

“I am the model,” he said dully.

However, the girl wasn’t looking at him. She was, in fact, burying her head into her hands, curling in on herself, as if trying to disappear into the floor.

“Why are you stripping?!” she asked, the tips of her ears a color normally reserved for stoplights.

“Figure drawing is done without clothing to better understand human anatomy,” he explained.

“So, you’re stripping?!” the girl gasped in horror, eyes wide and terrified as she looked up at him, “You’re taking off everything?!”

“Yes,” he said simply, though, by this point, he had already taken everything off but the sunglasses and made his way over to the stool where he’d be sitting for the next half hour.

“I’m supposed to draw your—” she cut herself off, flushed furiously, and pointedly did not look at his genitalia, “Junk?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Why do the sunglasses stay but not your underwear?” Bella asked, looking intently somewhere over his head.

He was not sure how to succinctly answer that, so he didn’t, instead he just sat on the stool and noted, “Your half hour begins now.”

Bella stared at the space behind his head dully, looked at her canvas, then back to the space behind his head, “If I—can’t draw your—you know, do I fail?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think this is a little—you know—inappropriate?” Bella insisted.

“You are taking an art course focused on human subjects,” Marcus pointed out, “Drawing from live models was in the syllabus.”

“Yeah,” Bella said dryly, “But you didn’t exactly tell me that what that really meant was staring at your—stuff for three hours.”

“You will be drawing all of me,” Marcus corrected, “Not simply my sexual organs.”

“Oh, great,” Bella said, “Glad we cleared that up.”

It took several seconds, but, eventually, she forced herself to look directly at him. She lasted two seconds before she had to look away again. She carefully set down her pencil and noted, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

She stood, left the room, and judging by the sound of her footsteps made it halfway down the empty hallway where she then let out a very frustrated scream.

She did not return for fifteen minutes.

When she did, it was in complete silence, a look on her face as if she were going into battle. Without a word, she sat down, picked up her pencil, and began to draw.

A half hour later, Marcus found himself staring at a portrait of a hideously deformed gargoyle.

It was too thin in places and far too bulky in others. One of his legs had become little more than a stub with a triangle for a foot. The features on the face had drifted into odd places. The left eye was far bigger than the right and far too far apart, instead of lips there was a single black straight line on his face. His nose appeared to have disappeared along with his sunglasses and most of his neck.

It was, perhaps, the worst thing he’d ever seen in his life.

“So, we’re done?” Bella asked.

He looked down at her, then slowly walked back to the stool, and simply commanded, “Try again, I will check your progress in another half hour.”

**Author's Note:**

> Why finish the first Twilight comedy being written when you can write another one alongside the first one?! In all honesty, I couldn't resist.
> 
> Thank you to Vinelle for help with the Italian and all the artwork along the way. I too, for the record, have made artwork of Bella's terrible terrible art on my tumblr (@theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin)
> 
> Thanks to readers, comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


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